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Re: Lana Del Rey

Lana Del Rey Tops U.K. Chart, Leaping Over Adele in 2012 Sales

As Lana Del Rey's "Born To Die" started a second week atop the U.K. album chart yesterday, Belgian Australian Gotye climbed 3-1 on the singles survey with "Somebody That I Used To Know," featuring Kimbra.

As Del Rey's title track dipped 9-10 and previous single "Video Games" moved back 22-17, her debut album added 60,000 new sales to its opening 117,000 to give it a year-so-far tally of 176,770 making it 2012's top selling U.K. album 2012 ahead of Adele's "21" 135,897.

Del Rey's also topped album chart new entries by Maverick Sabre and Paul McCartney. 21-year-old, London-born singer-rapper Sabre opened at No. 2 with his first album "Lonely Are The Brave," on 44,000 sales, while McCartney's "Kisses On The Bottom" arrived at No. 3, selling 23,000. That compares to an opening 21,000 for 2007's "Memory Almost Full," and the new set is McCartney's highest-charting U.K. album since "Flaming Pie" reached No. 2.

Re: Lana Del Rey

I thought I'd try her album out the other day, and it's been on my iTunes non stop. Summertime Sadness is literally the most beautiful song I've ever heard. Listening to it is like being carried by angels into some sort of musical nirvana, to me it is just the most perfect song.

Re: Lana Del Rey

A Star Is Born (and Scorned)

Curvaceous and pretty in a dress, she brims with catchy songs, all a bit retro, ironic and modern. Without straying too far off the pop grid, she’s the perfect antidote to Rihanna-Gaga overload — dare we say, a skinnier Adele, a more stable Amy Winehouse? Since posting “Video Games” to YouTube last summer, she’s amassed tens of millions of hits, sold out concerts to fashion’s who’s who and now, finally, has released her long-awaited album, which is currently No. 2 on the Billboard Top 200 in America, and No. 1 in Britain, Germany, Ireland, Switzerland and Austria. If you were going to manufacture a star for this moment, you’d manufacture her. Some people believe that’s precisely what happened.

Sitting in her producer’s Chelsea studio in jeans and an oversize sweater, smoking Pall Mall Blues that share space — in a beat-up snakeskin bag — with an old Tennessee Williams paperback, Lana Del Rey tries to shrug off the suggestion that her father bought her success, that her face went under the knife, that she is some sort of industry creation, all accusations floating around the Internet. It’s absurd or maybe flattering, but despite her laugh and smile, it hurts.

“I mean, I met everyone who is anyone in the music industry over the last six years and I was unsignable,” she says. “That’s what I was told by everyone. I would play my songs, explain what I was trying to do, and I’d get, ‘You know who’s No. 1 in 13 countries right now? Kesha.’ ”

There’s a formula for a pop song and a prescribed length for radio. Nothing Del Rey’s written obeys either. “ ‘Video Games’ was a four-and-a-half-minute ballad,” she says. “No instruments on it. It was too dark, too personal, too risky, not commercial. It wasn’t pop until it was on the radio.” And even “Born to Die” — her first big video — was, with its double chorus that never lifts, described to her as “another monotonous depressing song.”

For an hour, Del Rey and her producer Emile Haynie play songs from the album. She points out jazzy idiosyncrasies, quirky lyrics and favorite melodies. Sometimes she sings; often she gets up and dances. The last song they put on is “National Anthem”:

Red, white, blue’s in the skies
Summer’s in the air and
Baby, heaven’s in your eyes
I’m your national anthem
…
I sing the national anthem,
While I’m standing,
Over your body
…
Money is the anthem
God you’re so handsome

It may not be her most lyrically complex song, but it feels emblematic. As she did in the “Born to Die” video (in which she wraps her body in an American flag), she equates her sexuality to the national anthem. And she knowingly conflates love with material success. It feels like a wink at the listener. The Twitter generation loves a wink.

There’s also more than a little of Miley Cyrus’s “Party in the USA” in the song. Both you could play alone dancing in your bedroom, sing along to in your convertible with the top down or (it might surprise Cyrus’s Disney producers) find yourself gyrating to at an illegal warehouse rave. Whereas Cyrus’s song is a bland pop confection that somehow wound up cool, Del Rey’s track comes from someplace dark thematically and unstructured musically and ends up with pop appeal.

I explain my theory to Del Rey, in a roundabout way, and she nods, sings a bit of “Party in the USA” and ponders the matter for a few moments. “I really like that chorus,” she says. “I love an interesting melody.”

Haynie is more direct. “That’s the beauty of it,” he says. “That’s kind of the magic. She is supercool. The songs are as cool as it gets, sonically and aesthetically. But it’s like, ‘Wait a minute, this could resonate with the world.’ She started underground, small and kind of tight-knit, but some of these recordings are like, ‘Wow.’ I mean, that’s what I heard when I listened. It’s cool and it’s dark, but I thought, This could be big, you know?”

***

We head to a 10th Avenue Italian restaurant that her publicist has chosen. It feels tacky. “Do you want to just get a coffee across the street, and sit on a stoop? It’s not too cold?” she asks. I agree, though it is in fact too cold.

At the pizza place she orders a large coffee with no sugar, lots of milk. The server spots the old Tennessee Williams paperback in her purse, which sparks a conversation about 1950s movies and Elizabeth Taylor as Cleopatra.

Then he asks, “Are you two a couple?” and looks at me and says: “Today is your lucky day. I wish I was lucky like you.”

The presumption doesn’t stop him from flirting with Del Rey. “Big cup for you,” he says, handing her her coffee. “Just a little kiss for me.”

Del Rey laughs and hits him right back with: “Sure. Just a little kiss. Where do you want it?”

There was no kiss, but the subject of Del Rey’s mouth is an irresistible one. So, sitting on the steps of a 25th Street brownstone, I ask the seemingly preposterous question. “It’s fine,” she assures me. “They’re real lips, I mean. In real life my lips don’t look that big. I think because I cartoonized the footage of myself in the video for ‘Video Games’ things look exaggerated.”

If that video is to blame for a pernicious rumor, it is also to blame for putting her on the map. What it didn’t do was get her a record deal. Not until Fearne Cotton, a BBC D.J., stumbled across it and played it on Radio 1 last June. Suddenly the world was calling.

“I was struck by the wonderful combination of spine-tingling video footage, her haunting voice and the simplicity of the song,” Cotton wrote in an e-mail. “I watched it about five or six times in a row and became slightly fixated with it. The lyrics then started to really stand out and it became my song of last summer. … I had been waiting for a song like this.”

Hers is the typical experience. But falling in love with a video or a studio recording can set unrealistic expectations for Del Rey’s live performances. Look for her to break it down Nicki Minaj-style and you’ll be disappointed. Her turn on “Saturday Night Live” in January was widely criticized. She told me presciently about her anxiety beforehand: “I’m not by nature a showstopper. I love to write and play songs, but onstage, all these things come into play. I’m always saying to myself, Don’t mess up. Don’t mess up.”

Del Rey is a small-town girl. She grew up Elizabeth Grant in Lake Placid, N.Y., neither rich nor poor. She remembers as a kid asking herself cheesy meaning-of-life questions and thinking she was really special for doing so. Then, in high school, she took a philosophy class and realized she was like everyone else. While a philosophy major at Fordham University, she started finagling gigs in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, and the East Village. At 19 a small indie label signed her as Lizzy Grant for $10,000. “It was amazing. I got my own place to live. I lived on that money, finished school. At that point I envisioned having a very nice career touring small clubs, continuing my studies in philosophy and volunteering,” she tells me. “It’s actually the same vision I have today. I have a serious life here. I have a really big family. You know, I’m needed here.”

Needed by whom? She hints at family, which makes sense given the darker, psychosexual context of many of her songs.

What about love and loss, the other dark note in her oeuvre? “I felt the same way for a really long time, and then I met someone who I guess I fell in love with,” she says. “I just didn’t know I could feel differently. That time with him became sort of a place that I fell back to in my memory.”

And the breakup? “Well, I mean, the breakup is a part of it in the way that in the midst of loss you try to still look towards the light and not fall to pieces or do self-destructive things.”

She grows quiet, looks at her watch. It’s getting late. She admits that she doesn’t have an important industry meeting, as her publicist told me, but has to baby-sit for a friend.

Before she goes, I ask her where she lives. She’s looking to buy a place, but for now is in Williamsburg. “Staying with my ex-boyfriend,” she says nonchalantly, then bursts into nervous laughter and admits, “I live on his couch.”

I give her a look like, You just told me all that about falling in love and breaking up and you’re on the dude’s couch?

She pins it on the touring, letting out another embarrassed laugh. “Because no, I’m busy though!”

Re: Lana Del Rey

I bought the album like 3 0r 2 an a half weeks ago on itunes and believe me I love it my favorites songs are diet mountain dew, Off to the races, Carmen, lucky ones,radio hahaha I think I love the whole album I keep playing it in my iPod the whole day

Re: Lana Del Rey

Originally Posted by JJW234

I bought the album like 3 0r 2 an a half weeks ago on itunes and believe me I love it my favorites songs are diet mountain dew, Off to the races, Carmen, lucky ones,radio hahaha I think I love the whole album I keep playing it in my iPod the whole day

Re: Lana Del Rey

Lana Del Rey has announced two residencies in June: three nights at the El Rey in Los Angeles and three at Irving Plaza in New York. Those dates will be followed by shows in Europe. Full schedule is below:

Re: Lana Del Rey

I dont really care if it's Lizzy or Lana or whatever persona she or her music company comes up with next, as long as she doesnt take herself too seriously and or proclaim that her next album or single would be the song/anthem of our generation. Born to die is a pretty good album, that's good enough for me.

Re: Lana Del Rey

Originally Posted by knotty223

I dont really care if it's Lizzy or Lana or whatever persona she or her music company comes up with next, as long as she doesnt take herself too seriously and or proclaim that her next album or single would be the song/anthem of our generation. Born to die is a pretty good album, that's good enough for me.

Well said.

SNL parody had it spot on - DOZENS of musicians alter themselves. If they think her master plan was to release something that is VERY outside of the mainstream and TAKEOVER the music industry - they are wrong.

It's sad music, repetitive. At high's Fionna Apple like - at lows the lyrical content is bleh "money is the anthem, its a fact kiss kiss"

She has a good future and I'm glad she is bringing attention to different music styles.

He's lowered his voice another notch, perhaps worried the unhappy boy might find out about his unhappiness and be unhappier still. Empire Falls - Richard Russo

Re: Lana Del Rey

Queen of Alt-Pop, Video Game loving, Off To The Races going, and National Anthem singing soul snatcher Lana Del Rey has started writing her second album

From Spanish “S Moda” Magazine interview:

Quote:
On your second album, will you talk about what has fame brought to you?

“No, I will take up where I left everything. I’m starting to write new tunes. I have a new song that I love. [Sings a few lines: “In the land of the gods and the angels, I was a monster.”] [And] I thought, ‘God, it reminds me of Leonard Cohen!”

Re: Lana Del Rey

Re: Lana Del Rey

I've really come around on Lana Del Ray. For a long time I just couldn't get past those lips... but after having her album on heavy rotation on itunes/ ipod/ ipad for the past week, I'll admit she is a talented song writer and she creates some interesting imagery and and has built an interesting image which I suppose is an idealised version of herself. She's doing good pop music, which is never a bad thing.